thesethings

"Steve Newhouse, the chairman of Advance.net, decided very early on that his company would not be the blob that ate Reddit, and for the most part, left well enough alone. “We had some ideas about what would be good, but it might not have worked,” Mr. Newhouse said. “We paid attention to the community instead.”"

I may be remembering stuff wrong, but wasn't there more tension + conflict during the period right after the acquisition? Didn't Reddit struggle to pay for basic infrastructure stuff due to their new parent company's skepticism about its viability and perception of its value?

http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/reddit-needs-help.html

And it was a long while until it got spun out. (http://venturebeat.com/2011/09/06/reddit-break-conde-nast/)

Not that there's anything crazy in any of this. Just that the NYT story paints it like right away they 1) knew Reddit's worth and 2) knew to have a hands-off approach.

I'm far from a Reddit power user, happy to hear other perspectives.

That caught my eye too, and I guessed on Twitter that it might be a typo/under-explained.

Somebody from Tumblr (though on a different team) was nice enough to respond and guessed that it was because all media on S3 was not counted.

https://twitter.com/#!/adamlaiacano/status/16914079173274009...

Dashboard is more like a "reader." Everybody you follow is found there. Also any tags you subscribe to are there. Interactions like replies are also found there. I'd compare it to your Facebook feed or Twitter.com stream. It's your base of operations.

Lots of read-only content, and then a decent amount of interactions and events (messages/new follows/like notifications).

Kout doesn't really seem to be launched (you can only sign up for list). Whereas Gumroad lets you sign-up right now.

Gumroad's design is also a bit more inviting.

I hadn't heard of either of them until today, but one is definitely in a place where I would share the link with buddies, and the other I wouldn't.

You ask about "buzz" and I definitely think launching a working product is more newsworthy than a beta sign-up page. That said, Kout seems interesting as an idea.

I agree with your main point. But it's worth noting an interesting trend is developing. Amateur analysts are regularly outperforming professional analysts when it comes to tech stocks. http://seekingalpha.com/article/315207-apple-analysts-perpet... http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/01/02/bloggers-vs-pros-on-a...

Well put. I do marketing work on a few projects that have commercial blogs. In mose cases, we're able to get 1K+ Tumblr followers in < 3 months (not counting "regular" RSS subscribers). (And none of the projects are famous/have famous founders/services/products) To get the same amount of regular RSS subscribers is much more difficult.

Tumblr is comparable to Twitter in that it's a common place to meet your readers/customers. Unlike a self-hosted blog, you don't have to ask visitors to leave where they are to visit you. So you're likely to get a bit more foot traffic/interaction, not to mention people passing it on/sharing it out (via reblogs).

Now if you're an already established service/otherwise famous, you might have no problem getting people to check you out. But even then, Tumblr has its benefits.

I don't think the choice is necessarily all or nothing between self-hosted or Tumblr. Many companies with "real" blogs also have Tumblrs. In many cases companies have multiple Tumblrs. (Not unlike Twitter, it's becoming common to have a separate Tumblr for different events/products/branches/divisions. IBM has at least 3. NBC has at least 4...)

I won't disagree that Tumblr has horrible performance issues. But it's still worth it. Twitter 3 years ago had bad performance issues, but it was/is still definitely investing in. No social site is forever, but they're great tools as long as you're aware of costs + benefits.

Cool to hear about your positive incubator experience. I'm a little confused though. The main vibe of the blog post was generally critical of the value of most incubators and you said you "tend to agree." Not that these opinions are technically mutually exclusive, but i did go "wait. what?" and reread your comment over a few times.

Can you go a bit more into your incubator experiences (positive) and the parts of the post you agree with (negative?)?

(Not asking you to rant/heap praise/ do anything you're not comfortable with.)

I can't speak for him. But for me, "beautiful novelty" is often a site that impresses me, but doesn't convince me to use it (even if i am its target- so it's not like just because i don't have a dog, and it's a site for dog-owners or whatever).

I imagine that beautiful novelty, like beauty, is subjective and something not everybody would agree on a case by case basis. Though I bet most people have seen a site that had no flaws, was stunning (and yes all you designers- i know it's not just visual, it's interaction, etc) but still didn't convince your head or your heart.

Ah, I just meant that things can seem like a straw man if nobody is arguing the other side... but it isn't a straw man just because nobody identifies with that side (but do actually live and breathe that side).

"Beautiful novelty" is the phrase he used to describe "pretty (but) shitty" start-ups (another phrase in the post).

(I submitted this, but don't know the author personally, so there are some assumptions built into to the following.)

[edit- regarding issue of straw man perception] The issue is that nobody who makes beautiful novelty thinks their own work is beautiful novelty. (So nobody will appear in favor of it, even if they make it.)

So it's not quite a straw man. Everybody agrees that a certain type of thing is bad, but nobody thinks they themselves are responsible for that thing.

I suspect the author has some specific start-ups in mind but didn't want to call them out. Why have people be distracted by the drama of him dissing $startup in a blog post when he really wants people to ponder a more big picture idea?

Thanks for posting this. Can't believe I missed it. Seems this guy is riding a wave of outrage/Internet meme fun.

Thanks so much for posting, checking it out.

Just wanted to clarify that this wasn't a joke. If you're not in G+, you can't share this/don't have this button. (Whereas non-G+ members could have shared in Google Reader.)

Thanks, signing up, and kicking the tires. You'll be hearing from me.

I don't think this button exists if you've resisted the G+ vortex (I know, I know, a separate discussion :D...).

Thanks for this cool idea :D I will set it up at least for now.

But it doesn't solve the discovery part- having a place where I can see everything my friends are sharing- unless they do it too.

The no-sharing/discovery thing has hit me hard.

If anybody out there has a social RSS reader start-up, feel free to reply to this and advertise your service. I will drag my friends to it along with me.

(Yes, I use Twitter, Instapaper, news aggregate sites, etc. Yes social software has changed how i would otherwise discover links/news. But I still need an RSS reader, and the passive sharing in old Google Reader is a layer of social that one takes for granted in almost any app. I get why they took it out (they think they're helping G+), but it doesn't work for me.)

One minute after posting time, it's up for me.

I was an early Posterous user (still active), long waiting for another shoe to drop. The missing social things (stream view, notification banner, having others' content be your Dashboard, not your own old posts) seemed to be just sitting there, ready to be added at any moment.

The good:

So... the new dashboard view is better for presenting data that they already had "verbs" for. You can see new hearts (likes) to your posts much more easily, the default view is your subscriptions, not your own old posts (as it was previously).

Still needs work:

Discovery. There is no "regular" search, there is no tag search. The Find Friends just spins into time out for me. There is no directory or recommended Posterous spaces either.

[edit: Added everything below this line]

I'm generally hopeful. But I'm bummed that they really steer away from using the word blog/setting expectations for blog feature development. The "Sharing stuff socially" space is crowded and well served at a rapid pace with Path, Google+, Facebook, Dropbox, Instagram, etc.

I really want blog services to have a modern social lens (like Tumblr). Right now Tumblr is the only place that comes close.

I think there's room for more than one social blog platform (there's clearly room for more than one social photo sharing site, music sharing site, etc).

Posterous initially seemed to be a social blog platform that wanted to build out some of the "regular" (WordPress) features missing from Tumblr, like commenting.

I wanted to live in a world where there was a minimal, control freak, beautiful platform like Tumblr... AND a more "swiss army knife" social blog platform like Posterous.

Since then, Posterous has done so many about faces (getting really email-centric among other things), that I have lost my initial read on them, but I like these new changes despite the fact that they're inching away from blogdom.

(sidebar: it's worth noting here that there is a 3rd social blog platform, http://soup.io. Soup.io, like Posterous, has long seemed to be on the verge of dropping another shoe.)

That does address one's own Tumblr Dashboard when logged in. And there has been one browser extension that's gotten quite popular- Missing-E. But it's gone through battles with Tumblr, and also doesn't solve the "global" issue: I don't just wanna see stuff about me, I want to discover stuff outside my account. Example, "Who blogs about farmers markets in Miami?" Something like this is app-able in twitter, but not Tumblr given its current API.

I do still recommend checking out Missing-E. Don't put it on all your browsers (it can't keep up with Tumblr changes, and sometimes freezes). But it is helpful. (It's available for FF, Chrome, and Safari.) http://blog.missinge.infraware.ca/

I love Tumblr and get a lot of value from it both personally and professionally. I also regularly recommend it. (I start off with with this endorsement because I'm about to point out some opportunities for improvement that I don't want anybody to interpret as reasons not to use it. No matter what, you should probably be using it like people 2.5 years ago should have been starting to think about how they/if could use Twitter for their projects/socializing.)

On the one hand, Tumblr's lack of internal analytics (as referenced in this article) is a major weakness of almost all social networks. But on the other, users and businesses feel the pain more acutely on Tumblr than on other sites. It's a bit chicken and egg, but Tumblr is best consumed through its internal Dashboard, and many social interactions on Tumblr are invisible through any other interface. (When you see a Tumblr out on the web, it looks just like a normal website, but people "inside" the system are having a giant party you don't know about.)

Tumblr's API (very recently updated, I may be slightly behind on everything it supports) does not giving visibility to a lot of this stuff, so there's no rich ecosystem of clients like Twitter has. One can argue how well Twitter handles its developer community, but there's no denying that all the little tools out there, even if they only get "stolen" by Twitter in the end, give Twitter visibility to what users want.

Let's start with search. Twitter's original search was much worse than it is today (bad timing for me to write this, as for about a month now, Twitter search has been slightly broken). They bought Summize, who did search very well. In fact, Summize also did the first iteration of trending topics (which even if they make you worry about America, is a fascinating and incredible thing to have around).

Tumblr's personal search has been broken for about 3 years (longer?). There is pretty much no global search. (And not supported in API.)

The Twitter ecosystem also has a whole bunch of little point tools like "Where are your followers located?" and "What tags do you use the most?"

Tumblr at one point asked you what city you were in during onboarding, yet that data is nowhere to be seen, even by the account owner.

I'll stop with my examples. My point is mostly that sure, Tumblr could make an analytics dashboard. That would be great. OR, it could provide more data through the API, and I'm sure a developer community would spring up to meet many of these needs, and some we haven't even thought of.

This sounds like such a great idea. I travel in two circles that would love to check this out. Please do post it.

Thanks, this is quite nice.

I agree that spreadsheets are not optimal for reading tons of info, but I think they are easier than wikis for writing most stuff: Concurrent live editing w/out fear, no manual markup formatting, no Edit button, no Submit step... I think that was one of the points of the other thread (about the overnight book): that Google Docs and Spreadsheets are enabling some collaborative works that would have otherwise been more painful to create.

That said, Google supports lots of input + output formats. I hope you're right and somebody is hacking some cool stuff together.

edit: your proposed structure sounds really cool to me.

Perfect. And ... it seems your last link is the spreadsheet of spreadsheets! Great (and meta-great). :D

Done: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2772398

Related: Many cool collaborative Google Docs/Spreadsheets have begun here on Hacker News. It regularly impresses me when I glance at my Docs list and see them constantly updated/floating to the top (recent timestamps), getting more orderly and valuable over time.

Examples:

* The Web Design doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/14Ym6LTR9hLBGI0cM0mMU_BDE...

* The HN Contractors spreadsheet: https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AlD_6iE...

Sincere request: Can somebody explain the dynamics of how Stumbleupon is so popular? I don't know anybody who uses it. I am friends with alpha-geeks, teenagers, senior citizens, native Spanish-speakers in Mexico, etc. Barely anybody I know uses it.

I had a StumbleUpon account before Twitter, before StumbleUpon was a URL shortener, etc. I used it a little, but people didn't seem thaaaat into it. There must be some pocket of main use-case there. Is it mostly the URL shortener that even non-S.U. users bounce around in when directed to a su.pr URL?

I'd love to understand this.

(Also, as somebody else pointed out, S.U. traffic is pretty low-quality. Just peep your Google Analytics, and those sessions are quite short compared to Twitter/FB/Tumblr referrers. At least on my sites.)

I asked a question (and got it answered :D), and saw lots of other questions in there. Were you expecting a bigger turnout?

But he has sold a tech company, and is in general an experienced entrepreneur (plus knows old school finance and wall st money management from experience).

This doesn't make him infallible, but i'd much rather read business tips from somebody like this than a career journalist. (No offence to career journalists, they're great too, but for a different type of rigorous research.)